"It's 'The Grand Ole Bentley' up there,'" said Nashville Outlaws baseball club partner Jason Bennett, in town to serve as a seat-filler at Sunday night's 53rd annual Grammy Awards.

"The theme tonight is 'One for the fans, one for our heroes,'" Bentley said, setting up an evening that included Auerbach singing songs made famous by The Carter Family and Bill Monroe, Brown singing Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart" and Lambert duetting with Bentley on Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings." But not everyone focused on older material: Bentley's band backed Williams on Paramore's "The Only Exception" and also joined Lady Antebellum for "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" and a shriek-inducing (the good kind of shrieking: pleased, not frightened) take on record and song of the year nominee "Need You Now."

Even the folks who didn't sing were impressive: Elvis Costello, Diana Krall and Chris Stapleton (Grammy-nominated for best bluegrass album and best country duo or group performance with his former band, The SteelDrivers) were all in the house.

Those Darlins play Mercy Lounge on May 22 (photo: Travis Huggett/230 Publicity).

While it’s proven easy for fans and critics to get fixated on Those Darlins’ classic country flair, it’s probably easiest (and most accurate) to label the local trio as a punk group, pure and simple — see their raucous rendition of the Carter Family’s “Who’s That Knockin’ at My Window” (video after the jump) for an example.

We’re reminded of this as the band has now joined forces with local punk blog Nashville’s Dead for what was initially planned as a pair of shows in Nashville and Memphis, sharing a bill with a number of D.I.Y./house show standouts: So Jazzy, Natural Child and Pujol.

The Nashville show, scheduled for Saturday, May 22 at the Mercy Lounge (1 Cannery Row, 251-3020), will still go on as planned, but with a slight change. Bandmember Nikki Darlin took a spill at the Nelsonville Music Festival in Ohio, breaking both bones in her left forearm; the show will now be a fundraiser for her surgery bills, with the Darlins sans-Nikki playing as she recovers through June. The Memphis part of that show double-shot has been canceled.

The sound created by a long-gone North Carolina millworker infuses Loudon Wainwright III's new album.

The whole thing seems kind of inexplicable.

Here, after all, is boarding-school-bred folk songsmith Loudon Wainwright III, the master of good-humored internal excavation and a favorite of the NPR crowd, singing songs connected with long-gone North Carolina millworker Charlie Poole, a knockabout memory who plays fourth-string behind the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Stoneman in early country music history book chapters. Wainwright has a new album full of these songs — two full CDs, in fact. Thirty tracks, in the age of the digital single, gathered together as High, Wide & Handsome, packaged more like a book project than a musical endeavor (and released Aug. 18).

“Why?” asked Wainwright, questioning that question while sitting in a foyer at the Top O’Woodland bed-and-breakfast. “Well, I’m a big fan of Charlie Poole. He was an entertainer, you know. He would set up and play, do acrobatic things, balance on a chair — anything to put a song over. He was a working, traveling musician, and that’s what I do. I don’t sell any records.”

But what about structure and melody? Is Charlie Poole a genuine model for Wainwright?Continue reading →